Retrospective Review: Traveller

This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...
Mayday, Mayday... we are under attack... main drive is gone...
turret number one not responding...
Mayday... losing cabin pressure fast... calling anyone... please help...
This is Free Trader Beowulf...
Mayday...

Here's the second of my game system reviews based on extensive play; in this case, 48 years of Traveller. I still get goosebumps reading that text from the box of the original edition, just like the first time I read it.

Core Mechanic

Roll 2d6, add modifiers, meet or beat a target number to succeed.

These days, the most common modifier is a character's skill level, but that introduces a problem, namely that each skill improvement significantly changes the chances of success and you can't do it often before you run out of road. Initially, this was addressed by making improvement very hard, but later additions deal with the problem by adding skill specialisations - to get the equivalent of Engineering-1 in Classic Traveller you now need to take at least four different skills to that level.

Damage varies between editions, but usually involves rolling damage dice for the weapon and deducting the result from the character's physical attributes. Armour might or might not soak damage, depending on which edition you're using.

The Editions

Classic Traveller (1977, 1981, 1983): My fondness for the 1977 edition is well known, although I think it missed a trick in not using range bands for ship combat - that was in the 1983 Starter Edition. The 1981 edition is perhaps the most popular "Classic Traveller", and updated quite a few areas of character creation and equipment, not always for the better in my opinion; it also shifted to a consistent use of the metric system throughout, rather than the previous mixture of metric for most things and Imperial for tabletop ship combat.

MegaTraveller (1987): Many hold this to be the best edition, but the approach of throwing every rule ever written for the game into one set of rulebooks didn't do it for me, and I really didn't like the Rebellion Era soft reboot of the setting. However, the task system was a great idea, if somewhat over-detailed, and a worthy addition to the game. I played this edition a little, but never really ran it as a GM; I found it bigger and more complicated than Classic Traveller without being any more fun.

Traveller: The New Era (1993): I tried very hard to like this, but failed. The hard reboot of the setting didn't do it for me; and converting the game to the poorly-named "GDW House System" - basically second edition Twilight: 2000 - nerfed all the fun bits of the game while introducing even more complexity and detail. My perception was that this was not so much a game as it was the "series bible" for a series of novels, and indeed there were some written. I did run this for a few sessions before switching to 2300AD as the game engine.

Marc Miller's Traveller (AKA "T4", 1996): I always felt this was released before it was finished; there seemed to be a lot missing, and a lot of elements which didn't integrate together well. This was the point in my gaming career where I shifted from "there's a bit missing here, no problem, I'll write something to fill the gap" to "Mr Publisher, I am paying you for this game and I expect it to be complete and consistent within its advertised scope". I ran this for less than a year before switching to GURPS.

GURPS Traveller (1998): At this time, I was playing and running quite a bit of GURPS 3rd Edition, including a game in the Stargate universe and an unusually large Traveller-related campaign set in the Dark Nebula during the Aslan Border Wars, with a huge story arc being pursued by multiple groups of face to face, play-by-post, and play-by-email players. Good heavens, that was a lot of work, but it spun off my contributions to Alien Races 2 and Alien Races 3, which I think were the last gaming materials I wrote for money, because around that time I stopped enjoying that.

Traveller20 (2002): I looked at T20, and liked some of the artwork and deck plans, but Traveller with a class-and-level d20-based system just feels wrong to me.

Traveller Hero (2006): I'm aware this exists, but I've never actually seen it. One gamer I know waxes lyrical about how wonderful the Champions RPG and its successor the Hero System are at every opportunity, and keeps trying to persuade me to try them; but for some reason, neither interests me.

GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars (2006): I looked at this one, as I quite like this part of the setting; but it was intended for GURPS 4th Edition, and I'd checked out of GURPS a few years earlier. Having leafed through a copy, it seemed to be chiefly setting material which didn't interest me with no supporting adventures.

Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition (2008): I've played and run this, a little, but didn't much like it, for three reasons; first, dynamic initiative, second, the artwork, and third, skill creep - there are hundreds of skills, many of them specialisations of other skills. This had a kind of Open Gaming Licence which resulted in the Cepheus Engine being released as a clone ruleset, making it easier for third parties to produce content; that produced the kind of explosion in products we saw a few years earlier with the D&D OGL, exploiting the potential for Traveller to be used in a wide range of settings - something GDW never pursued, although Mongoose and the third parties did.

Traveller5 (2013, 2019): I bought the 2013 edition of Traveller5, and decided it wasn't so much a game as a toolkit for making your own SF RPG. My gearhead days are far behind me now, so the T5 PDFs languish on a CD in one of the darker recesses of my bookshelves. The chief impact this has had on my gaming is making the Traveller Map and Traveller Wiki steadily less usable at my table as they are gradually rewritten using T5, burying what I care about under mounds of detail I'm not interested in.

Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (2016, 2022): I've both run and played this, and while I consider it an improvement on the 1st Edition, the galloping skills creep still puts me off; I'll happily play it, but I don't expect to run it again. The 2016 edition had no ship design rules in it, but it's been over 40 years since I used anything except the standard designs, so that wasn't an issue for me. I hated the isometric deck plans - useless at the table - but thankfully the 2022 edition did away with those.

Pros and Cons

If you know any SF RPG at all, it's likely to be Traveller. It wasn't the first, but it keeps chugging away, assimilating new ideas and game systems as they arise to better serve the needs of the collective.

Like most first generation RPGs, it's very simple to learn and teach. Most editions have random encounter tables and core gameplay loops which make them well-suited to co-op or solitaire play.

All editions are highly modular, with a core rulebook, and supplements allowing you to expand in the directions you're interested in - this started with Book 4, Mercenary, expanding the weapons lists and military character creation, adding mass combat and mercenary operations.

However, it takes a long time to create a character, and due to the lifepath creation method adopted by most editions, you have no guarantee that the resulting character will fit into the group or indeed be anything you'd want to play. Mongoose editions deal with this by handing out extra skills from a package tailored to the chosen campaign type, so that every PC has at least one skill that will be of some use.

SF is a broad church, and there are some things that are harder to do in Traveller than others. It was originally intended to emulate the Golden Age SF of the 1940s to 1970s, and it does that well; you can adapt it to cover cyberpunk, but AI, nanotech, and transhumanist Nu Space Opera get increasingly difficult to fit in without breaking the setting, if not the rules.

Changes Over the Years

In some ways, Traveller is more a setting than it is a set of rulebooks. The Third Imperium has a wide range of sectors of space and time periods in which you can run almost any kind of adventure, and you can interface with this core using any one of the editions. MegaTraveller broke the Imperium with a civil war, with the intention of creating more factions (which drive adventures) and borders (which are where adventures happen). TNE razed it to the ground to deal with how hard it was for new players to get up to speed with all the setting material. T20 and T4 (and later, GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars) sidestepped the issue by picking times and places far away from the contentious bits. GURPS Traveller, and later Mongoose Traveller, took place in a universe where the Rebellion and subsequent Virus never happened, or at least haven't happened yet. Would that DGP and GDW had taken that path.

Setting aside forks of the game like GURPS Traveller and Traveller Hero, the core rules from GDW and DGP grew steadily more complex and less fun, with Mongoose trying hard to produce something that marries the look and feel of Classic Traveller with more modern sensibilities as to rules, and I think largely succeeding.

At its core, the game is still roll 2d6, add skill level, aim for 8+.

My Future With Traveller

I think this is where I get off the Traveller train, at least as a GM. I feel I am being steadily pushed out by ever-increasing levels of detail in both T5 and Mongoose 2nd Edition; I can - and have - taken a stand, saying that a specific set of products are considered canon for my campaign and anything else is what the PCs heard from a bloke down the pub and not to be trusted. This is easy to justify, as Traveller products are no more consistent with each other than they are with my vision of the setting; but I feel increasingly uncomfortable all the same.

If I were a hedgehog knowing one big thing, that one big thing would be Classic Traveller; in hindsight, every later edition has been a step away from what I love about the game.

Periodically I read through it and think "I want to run it again, but I'd have to change this bit, and that bit..." and what I had at the end of that wouldn't really be Traveller. My current approach is to run Traveller adventures using Savage Worlds. Is that still Traveller? I'm not sure. It feels like it to me, and the players still refer to my game as "Traveller", so maybe it is.

Regardless, scratch the surface of any of my SF games, and you will see Traveller shining through underneath. In some ways, I can never leave it behind.